Firefox 2.0 Posted a Day Early

A number of readers alerted us to the [link removed] day-early [accidental] posting of Firefox version 2.0. At this writing the top page at mozilla.com still doesn't mention its availability. One reader pointed us to [link removed] a mirror and another recommended a comprehensive review of Firefox 2.0, with many screenshots, over at mozillalinks.org. Update by RM: - links above removed at request of Mozilla release people. They asked us to link to this note instead. They're only asking us to wait until Tuesday Afternoon (U.S. Pacific Time) for the official 2.0 download, which isn't long. (Patience is a virtue, etc.)

Comments

Nice!

[Anonymous Coward]

Linking to a 5.4Mb file directly on Slashdot. Nice!

Damnit!

[Anonymous Coward]

And I just finished emerging 1.5...

So that's how they do it

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

The Firefox team are assured never to suffer 0-day exploits by making -1-day releases. Clever, clever...

Re:So that's how they do it

[acidrain]

They could also be the first to have a -1 day exploit, which would look even worse.

Re:So that's how they do it

[gardyloo]

Is this some sort of "There are only -3 types of people" joke?

Which release group gets credit?

[Anonymous Coward]

And where is the /crack directory? I guess they put a serial in the nfo.

Wikipedia Support for Firefox 2 Added

[yurik]

There is now Firefox 2 support enabled on all Wiki*edia sites. To use, navigate to http://en.wikipedia.org/ (or any other language/project), click the search engine selector button in the upper right corner, and click "add wikipedia". The added bonus is that auto-suggest is also working - as you type you search, it will provide a list of page titles that begin with the typed letters.

One note - the timeout is set to 500ms, which is not too long (especially when the entire slashdot visits wiki). To make it longer, open firefox_install_dir\components\nsSearchSuggestions .js, and edit the "_suggestionTimeout: 500" line. Something like 2000 works fine for me.

--Yurik / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Yurik

Re:As pointed out in MY story submission...

[eipgam]

Heaven forbid you actually learn to spell words correctly! :)

pls wait 24 hours

[jhermans]

For crying out loud ! Can't we just leave those Mozilla folks alone for a day, so that they can prepare the release. They have to post 38 different executables, and do a very last check to see if they actually work.

Re:Huh?

[jpardey]

1) crush meme 2) ? 3) profit!

Re:Huh?

[Stormwatch]

Stop crushing the memes, you insensitive clod!

Re:Language

[Xemu]

Why not use bittorrent for it's best legal use: downloading firefox!

Its not a day early

[Tama00]

Its tuesday here in Austalia, for all you who dont know, the main developer for Firefox lives in New Zealand!

SO it is ontime, not early.. you people of slashdot are just slow.

Re:Its not a day early

[Tumbleweed]

Does the en-NZ version render all the text upside-down?

Only in the northern hemisphere.

Re:Huh?

[Werkhaus]

OMG!!! Memes!!!!

Snappy and uses less memory

[Sarusa]

One thing not really mentioned in the preview is that they definitely seem to have the memory under control finally. I've had up to 30 tabs open (only a dozen now) and have been using it all day and it's only using 75MB of memory. FF1.5 would be hovering around 250MB after the same use.

It also feels much snappier in general, if only because it's not sprawling all over the paging file (I don't know what other speed tweaks it has).

All my extensions except undoclosetab updated automatically (and that's built in now) so that was probably the smoothest upgrade I've ever had. Though I use the LittleFox theme and I was on version 1.5, which looked very strange in FF2.0. But after a manual 'look for updates' for themese it found LittleFox 1.7 which looks great.

So far I'm very pleased with it.

BitTorrent links

[Anonymous Coward]

Official Mozilla BitTorrent site:
http://bittorrent.mozilla.org/
(2.0 is not there yet, but use that link when it gets updated)

Unofficial torrents (Website ads are NSFW):
http://torrentspy.com/torrent/891929/Firefox_2_0_F inal_EN_US
http://torrentspy.com/torrent/891930/Firefox_2_0_F inal_EN_GB
(The first link is US version, second is GB version)

(posted AC to avoid karma-whoring)

Re:BitTorrent links

[kennygraham]

Oh yeah I actually new that. I like the spellchecker because I can think like a college grad but I spell like a 4 year old.

Seems not even the spell checker will help you.

Re:BitTorrent links

[Ed Avis]

Yeah, in the British version of Firefox cookies are referred to as 'biscuits'.

PLEASE stop linking to unreleased builds

[BZ]

See http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/preed/2006/10/the_a ntirelease.html for the Mozilla build team's take on articles like this one.

OFFICIAL STATEMENT

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox 2 has not yet been officially released. Please be patient. We still plan on launching Tuesday, October 24th in the afternoon pacific time. Linking to anything other than getfirefox.com or mozilla.com hurts us, our volunteer mirror network, and our ability to effectively serve up and guarantee availability of Firefox. Thank you! -- cbeard@mozilla.org

IE7 Makes Firefox Irrelevant

[thelifter]

This is a shameless attempt on the part of Mozilla to stave off the crushing mindshare defeat that Microsoft is about to hand out with Internet Explorer 7. With improved support for stuff and things, IE7 promposes to make Firefox 2 obsolete by nightfall on it's release date.

IE7 will ship with the patented Cure For Cancer toolbar and embedded network optimization that makes tastefully photographed adult literature download 50% percent faster than with the dinosaur browser.

And that's not all. MS didn't forget about you developers. IE7's javascript debugger provides error messages that are 83% more ambiguous than with Firefox.

It's a well known fact that FireFox's only real market growth is in the UK where people hate fire, but like foxes. Therefore, Firefox can only achieve 50% marketshare in the UK maximum. Elsewhere in the world where fire and foxes are both despised, the Firefox market is limited to people who like dinosaurs which is just 10 year old boys named Kyle.

Just kidding.

Firefox Rules.

Re:New version

[gad_zuki!]

>The latest version is quite nice.

As someone who is used to 20+ tabs at one time, I disagree. The new tab limitation is a pretty lousy UI change. Its like Mozilla and MS are trying to outcrap each other in the UI department. At 1024x768 I get 10 tabs. Now I have to scroll tabs (!) or use the tab selector (ugly hack) to see the rest. I know there's a config item I can change to restore 1.5 like behavoir but I shouldnt have to do this in a browser that advertises the advantages of tabs. The old system worked fine: tabs would dynamically shrink as you add more. If a user wants to have nice big tabs they know not to open more than 8 or so. Those who dont need to be reminded that the green slashdot favicon is actually Slashdot.org could open 20-30 tabs. I paid for this RAM and I like using it. Now everyone gets big tabs no matter what.

Also, why are extensions called "add-ons" now?

Re:Firefox 2.0 is soooooooo fast...

[Anonymous Coward]

I must be the super fastest then. I beat myself to the internet every day.

Re:Actually it's 45.6 Mb

[Lord Ender]

(The SI guys can take a hike. The computer industry has been using kilo, mega, etc for powers-of-two since they got away from decimal computers almost 50 years ago now. It was the disk drive marketing guys who started pre-empting that so that they could advertise their eg 95.37 MB drives as 100 MB.)

It's people like you who cause entire space missions to fail. "Mega" has meant a power of TEN for much longer than "the computer industry." Besides, computers are used outside the computer industry these days.

Get with the times an learn the difference between Mi M Ki K Gi G B b etc..

Any decent engineer would loathe ambiguity. You think "mega" should mean different things depending on context? What are you, a Perl programmer?!? DEMONS BE GONE!!